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| October 13, 2006 2:42 AM
The Fog of Stats
Lies, damn lies, statistics, and Iraq.
By Mark Goldblatt
I’m guessing about a nanosecond passed between the moment the British medical journal The Lancet published a study claiming that roughly 600,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war and the moment critics of the war began quoting the figure as gospel truth. The study, conducted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath (JHBSPH), is based on a “scientific” methodology in which household surveys were conducted, census numbers examined, death certificates tabulated and data extrapolated from the results. “Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population has died above what would have occurred without conflict,” the study concludes.
Now let me see if I’ve got this straight. The JHBSPH study attempts to calculate the number of civilian deaths “above what would have occurred without conflict.” I wonder, therefore, if the survey group was taking into account the effects of United Nations sanctions on Iraq prior the invasion — which, if the conflict hadn’t occurred, would logically still be in place. According to U.N. studies using similar methodologies to those utilized by JHBSPH, roughly 150,000 civilians, more than half of them children, were dying every year as a direct result of U.N. sanctions. Since the sanctions ended in May 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, that means that in the 3.5 years since then, roughly 525,000 lives were spared. If we compare that number with the JHBSPH’s estimate of 600,000 lives lost as a result of the conflict, we’re led to conclude that George W. Bush’s decision to oust Saddam has cost roughly 75,000 Iraqi civilian lives. But the JHBSPH researchers acknowledge a huge margin for error; their low end estimate is 426,369. That means Bush’s decision to invade may actually have saved almost 100,000 lives.
What was it Mark Twain once said about “lies, damn lies and statistics”?
The manipulation of information is part of the fog of war, of course. That’s a point worth remembering whenever you’re confronted with ludicrous numbers like those put out by the JHBSPH. Indeed, that’s a point worth remembering whenever anyone starts talking about the civilian body count in Iraq. Agendas abound. On the political Left, peace activists and opportunistic Democratic politicians invariably cite high-end statistics in order to justify their attacks on the Bush administration. For that reason, they favor U.N. figures. According to the U.N., for example, 3009 Iraqi civilians were killed in August 2006 (the last month for which U.N. has published data) in the ongoing terrorist insurgency, down from 3590 in July.
Skeptical American military commanders point out that the U.N. numbers are based on combined reporting from the Iraqi health ministry, which is controlled by supporters of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and Baghdad’s central morgue, which apparently designates every unidentified corpse as a victim of the war. Indeed, the U.N. numbers feel inflated since 3,000 killings per month averages out to over a 100 every day — a total that far exceeds daily media accounts. By contrast, Reuters reports the civilian toll in August at 769, down from 1065 in July. (In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that Reuters reports the body count in September as 1,089, a sharp rise in fatalities from August.) The Reuters figures are derived from combined data provided by the Iraqi ministries of health, interior, and defense — dubious sources, to be sure — but not data from the Baghdad morgue.
Again, when it comes to assessing Iraqi civilian casualties, you’re always dealing with a world of murky numbers. That inconvenient reality has never stopped critics of the Bush administration from spouting high-end estimates in order to argue that the war is an unmitigated disaster, and that Bush himself must be held accountable for the carnage.
Notwithstanding the motives and methodologies of Bush’s detractors, there is an undeniable logic to the idea that the Bush administration should be held accountable for the death toll of Iraqi civilians. By toppling the brutal Hussein regime, America undermined the strong central authority which had kept Sunnis and Shiites from one another’s throats for decades. But unless we’re willing to concede that Iraqis were better off under the genocidal thumb of Saddam, and then his sons Uday and Qusay, and afterwards their sons, and so on, in perpetuity, then we must conclude that freedom for Iraqis always entailed a transition period of religious bloodshed.
If, in any event, the Bush administration is to be held accountable for the current civilian body count in Iraq, then, in a broader sense, the president should also be credited with the deaths that aren’t occurring — which brings us back to the effects of U.N. sanctions. Recall that the sanctions were in place because of Saddam’s failure to comply with the terms of the 1991 ceasefire agreement that ended the first Gulf War. According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, roughly 5,000 Iraqi children under the age of five were dying each month as a direct result of the sanctions. Again, that’s the body count just for children under the age of five.
Certainly, that 5,000 number was always a grotesque exaggeration; Saddam’s own Health Ministry was providing the raw data on which it was based. More realistic estimates range between 1,200-2,000 dead Iraqi children per month. But if you’re going to trust U.N. numbers, then trust them consistently. If today’s critics of the Bush administration continue to damn the war in Iraq based on the U.N.’s hyper-inflated Iraqi civilian casualty figures, or based on the new super-duper-hyper-inflated JHBSPH numbers, then fairness demands they also remember the U.N. data on the effects of the prewar sanctions.
Indeed, the U.N. estimate of 5,000-dead-Iraqi-children-per-month was regularly cited throughout the late 1990s by knee-jerk celebrities such as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Bonnie Raitt, Mike Farrell, Joan Baez, Ed Asner, Jackson Browne, Pete Seeger, Richard Dreyfuss and Richard Gere; by Democratic politicians such as John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, John Lewis, Cynthia McKinney and Debbie Stabenow; and by don’t-confuse-us-with-the-facts commentators such as Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Ward Churchill, Ramsey Clark, Arundhati Roy, and Noam Chomsky.
All of the above, predictably, howled in opposition to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
Now that the sanctions have ended, no one on the political left ever mentions the U.N. figures on the prewar child-mortality rate in Iraq — like portraits of disgraced Soviet leaders, the dead children have been conveniently “disappeared” from the collective memory of critics of the Bush administration.
History will remember them however. Even if JHBSPH researchers, and the rest of the political Left, do not.
—Mark Goldblatt is author of Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban culture. |
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